When you’re going through a phase that compels you to put more time, effort, brainpower, and heart into your job, how do you work it out with your family and others who matter in your life? And how do you make sure this spike in your focus on work doesn’t become a “new normal” that extends indefinitely into the future? The short answer: Dialogue about what matters most—to you and to them.
First, forget balance, which is a misguided metaphor for what success looks like in the different parts of life. It’s not possible to have perfect equilibrium among the four domains of life—work, home, community, and self—every day, every week, or even every year. Naturally, there are times when any one of these aspects of your life has to take center stage.
When a spike in work-related activities is having a deleterious effect on your family or on some other part of your life, then it’s time for what I call “stakeholder dialogues”—conversations with the people who matter most about your mutual expectations and how best to meet them, now and in the long run.
Here are five steps to take in such conversations:
You’re likely to discover possibilities for actions you can take that won’t cost you much, but will help to minimize any damage caused by your work spike. You might even improve the quality of your relationships with your family, friends, and others in your life.
Assuming that if you’re not home for dinner that your family is losing out, or that you’re losing out, may not be an accurate read. Maybe driving your daughter to school is more important to her than your being home for dinner. Your spouse might be happy to meet you in town for dinner, even if you have to return to the office while he or she heads home afterward. Maybe they don’t care so much if your travel increases or the length of your workday increases, as long as they have your undivided attention when you are at home. You won’t know until you ask.
What I’ve found is that what others expect of you is usually a bit less than, and somewhat different from, what you think they expect of you. And unless you know what’s essential and meaningful to them, now and in the future, you can’t generate creative solutions that make sense for all of you.
Once you’ve navigated your way through an especially tumultuous episode at work and managed to keep your domestic ship of state on course, it’s useful to again be deliberate in choosing a path forward that suits all parties. You might want to mark the end of that period as a special occasion with a celebratory dinner, as a way of closing the book on it.
Then, keep your stakeholder dialogues going as you return to a normal workload. Take a bit of time to review which of the strategies you employed worked well and which did not. The key is remaining open to discovering new ways of adjusting—either at work or at home—that let you pursue what you care about most, no matter what the world throws at you.
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Stewart D. Friedman is the Professor of Management Practice Emeritus at the Wharton School. The former head of Ford Motor’s Leadership Development Center, he is the author of Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life, Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family, and Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. For more, visit www.totalleadership.org, or find him on Twitter @StewFriedman or on LinkedIn.
Adapted from content posted on hbr.org, February 23, 2015 (product #H01W2T).
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